I have a scavenged 400 MHz Dell Optiplex GX1 with an extra network card protecting the network like one of the big boys:
- Smoothwall taking care of the firewall stuff
- Spam assassin taking care of all the spam (70% of traffic is spam on the mail server)
- QOS traffic shaping for VOIP.
- Full content filtering via dansguardian – daily blacklist updates
- privoxy to filter out ads, etc from web pages.
- ClamAV protecting the network from viruses, including phishing emails- daily profile updates
It took some time to get running properly, mostly from me getting up to speed on how the components work. I did run into some trouble for a few hours when I wasn’t careful and installed an incompatible version of dansguardian. Killed http completely for a bit.
It started getting a little flaky as I got everything turned on and configured. After scratching my head a bit, I figured out the system was running out of memory. I disabled Antivirus and everything was fine. Today I upped the RAM to 320 MB and it seems to be working perfectly.
I was afraid running all that on one old machine would overload it, but it seems to be totally fine. Web browsing is noticably snappier due to privoxy screening out all the junk.
Other than the time invested, this thing cost me $0. I could acquire the parts for easily less than $100, maybe less than $50.
Posted by Pat McKay 
